Welcome to another edition of Fedya's "Movies to Tivo" thread, for the week of November 2-8, 2015. We're in the first full week of a new month, so we get a new Star of the Month on TCM. There are also some other programming changes that we'll mention. And, there are interesting movies on other channels as well. As always, all times are in Eastern, unless otherwise mentioned.
We'll start off this week with MGM's idea of wholesome B movie entertainment: Four Girls in White, at 11:30 AM Monday on TCM. The title refers to nurses at a big-city hospital, and the four nurses are Norma (Florence Rice), her kid sister Pat (Ann Rutherford), Mary (Mary Howard), and comic relief Gertie (Una Merkel). Norma is trying to bag a rich doctor or patient, although her attempts to do eventually get the nurses in trouble. They'll have a chance to redeem themselves when disaster strikes, in the form of a flood washing a bridge out and a train going over into the abyss. Yikes. Ann Rutherford would go on to play Scarlett O'Hara's sister Coreen in Gone With the Wind (9:45 PM Wednesday on TCM), while Merkel's comic relief is with young Buddy Ebsen. Run of the mill in many ways, but it shows how the studio system could make even B movies look good.
Over on Encore Westerns, there are a couple of interesting movies this week. The first one is The Bravados, which you can catch at 11:45 PM Monday and again at 8:20 AM Friday. Gregory Peck stars as Jim, a man who is a widower because his wife was murdered by a gang of men. Jim has been looking for those men, and when he gets to Santa Rita, he finds that the four men are scheduled to be hanged for killing a teller during a bank robbery. So far so goo. Except that the four (Stephen Boyd, Lee Van Cleef, Albert Salmi, and Henry Silva) escape, taking a female hostage with them. A posse is formed, and Jim eventually winds up taking leadershi pof the posse, although most of the townsfolk don't quite get why he wants to lead that posse. The only one who does is landowner Josefa (Joan Collins). Jim may be able to get his revenge, but if so, it's going to come at a price.
I can't recall whether I've recommended the movie One Minute to Zero before. It's airing at 12:30 PM Tuesday on TCM. Robert Mitchum stars as Col. Jankowski, who at the start of the movie is training the fledgling Republic of Korea (ie. South Korea) army in early 1950. Then June 1950 comes along, and the evil commies from the North have the unmitigated gall to invade! So the US Army gets tasked with finding American civilians and bringing them to safety; one of these is the widow Linda (Ann Blyth). She works for the UN and thinks the UN can actually do good, so she doesn't want to evacuate. Eventually she and the colonel fall in love. What also winds up happening is that the UN authorizes military action against the invading north, so the Americans among other western nations join in the war on the side of the south. There's a surprisingly shocking scene of the north trying to advance behind a bunch of refugees, and the western response to this.
Tuesday night brings a new Star of the Month to TCM: Norma Shearer. Shearer started her career in the silent era and continued through the 1930s. This first Tuesday in November brings a bunch of those silents, including A Lady of Chance at 9:15 PM. Shearer plays Dolly, who at the start of the movie is working as a hotel switchboard operator. However, she had a past as a con artist(!), and two of her old partners in crime (Lowell Sherman and Gwen Lee) spot her, so they blackmail her in to going back with them or else be turned over to the authorities. Dolly is good at bilking men, and decides to strike out on her own, going to a cement convention in Atlantic City which is where she meets Steve (Johnny Mack Brown). Dolly is planning to make him her next victim, except that she falls for the good guy, even though he turns out not to be rich at all. And then to make matters more complicated, her old partners show up again, trying to get a piece of the action.
A movie returning to FXM Retro after a long absence is Boy on a Dolphin, at 4:00 AM and 1:00 PM Thursday. Sophia Loren stars as Phaedra, a woman living in the Greek islands who makes a living with her family as a sponge diver. One day she's diving when she finds a statue of a boy riding a dolphin, which it turns out is an antiquity and worth a fortune. However, getting it out of the sea is a problem and there's the question of who's going to do that. Phaedra, being the lover of Greece that she is, wants to see the statue remain in country, and the American archaeologist Calder (Alan Ladd) would be the man to do that. Except that he doesn't have the money, and smarmy rich guy Victor (Clifton Webb) does. Oh, they both want Phaedra too. Who wouldn't considering how good she looks. The movie was shot on location in color and Cinemascope, both of which make the Greek islands and the Athenian ruins look almost as good as Sophia Loren herself.
Before 42nd Street in 1933, musicals were not a particularly popular movie genre largely because they had become incredibly stagey with lousy performances. An interesting example of this early musical phenomenon is Sweet Kitty Bellairs, airing on TCM at 6:00 AM Thursday. Claudia Dell plays the title role of a woman in late 18th century England going to the spas at Bath in order to flirt with all the men. On the way, her coach, with Lord Varney (Walter Pidgeon) as a fellow passenger, is held up by a highwayman, but he lets them go because he's enamored with Kitty. As is the shy Varney and every other man she meets. Meanwhile, in Bath, Kitty helps a wife (June Collyer) get her husband (Ernest Torrance) interested in her again, but when Varney goes there hoping to see Kitty he's caught by the husband, who thinks that Varney has been having an affair with the wife, at which point he challenges Varney to a duel. It goes on like this. Pidgeon in 18th century garb is a sight, and the movie was originally done in two-strip Technicolor but the only known surviving prints are in black and white.
Thursday night on TCM brings this month's TCM Programmer: Greg Proops, whom I only know from those snarky list shows, mostly because I never watched Whose Line Is It Anyway. He's selected four of his favorite films, and will be presenting them on Thursday:
First up at 8:00 PM is Grand Illusion, the French anti-war classic about French POWs in World War I Germany;
At 10:15 PM is the 1973 version of The Three Musketeers;
Then at 12:15 AM Friday you can catch Robert Mitchum getting drawn in by two people from Out of the Past;
Finally, at 2:00 AM is Dog Day Afternoon starring Al Pacino as a bank robber.
Two weeks ago saw the last of the Bulldog Drummond movies, so this Saturay at 10:30 AM we get a new movie series on TCM: the Bowery Boys movies. They started off as the Dead End Kids, after their characters in the 1937 movie Dead End proved to be so popular that audiences wanted to see more of them. Eventually, by the end of World War II, they morphed into the Bowery Boys, roles they would play for a good 10 years even though they were no longer boys but pushing 40 and then some by the end of the series.
Saturday night on TCM sees a bunch of movies about women standing up to the system. One that I haven't mentioned before is Marie, at 10:15 PM. Sissy Spacek stars as Marie Ragghinati, a woman who, having been divorced and with a young child, goes back to school to get her degree, which ultimately leads to her appointment to the Tennesse Board of Pardons and Paroles. There, she witnesses corruption as people are paying the governor and his aides to buy paroles! Marie stands up to this, and gets fired! So she fought for her rights and as the truth came out, it led to the governor not running for re-election and leaving office in disgrace, and some of the governor's aides being convicted. And, in fact, all of this is based on a true story. When Marie's suit went to trial, she was represented by... Fred Thompson, who would play himself in the movie, despite not having done any serious acting before this. (Then again, it can't be too hard to play yourself.) That of course led to Thompson's further fame and his ultimately hawking reverse mortgages.
The other movie on Encore Westerns is McClintock!, which you can catch several times, including at 4:45 AM Sunday when it doesn't conflict with any of the other movies I've recommended. I'm recommending this one for the presence of the recently deceased Maureen O'Hara; TCM will be doing a 24-hour salute to O'Hara later in the month and I think this one is going to be included. John Wayne stars as McClintock, the man who owns everything in the area but is about to find that he's getting a lot more than he bargained for. There's Devlin (Patrick Wayne) who has arrived in the region thanks to the Homestead Act with a bunch of other people to farm land that's not really suitable for agriculture. The other problem is his daughter Becky (Stefanie Powers) who is about to come home after spending two years back east at college. She brings Mom Katherine (Maureen O'Hara) with her. Mom and Dad have been estranged for a couple of years now, and they're about to have another conflict. Mom wants Becky to live permanently back east, but Dad's having none of that. Meanwhile, the two parents are realizing that they still have feelings for each other.... McClintock! is a comedy, something you don't necessarily expect from John Wayne.
One that you're going to have to record while the Packers are beating the crap out of Carolina is Kaleidoscope, airing Sunday at noon on TCM. Warren Beatty stars as Barney, who in the opening sequence breaks into a factory and doctors a bunch of printing plates. It turns out that these plates are used to make the playing cards that all the great casinos of Europe uses, so that every deck of cards they have will be marked -- changing out the cards won't help. Barney's plan is to use this to make a killing from the casinos, but he's caught out by Scotland Yard man McGinniss (Clive Revill). McGinnis doesn't necessarily want to panic casino goers, so he offers Barney a way out: use the marked cards to take down the notorious criminal Dominion (Eric Porter) in a high-stakes poker game. Along the way, Barney falls in love with McGinnis' daughter Angel (Susannah York). When the time comes for the poker game, it turns out that the cards are no longer being marked! A fun, if not particularly challenging, caper movie.
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